Assessing the effects of air temperature and rainfall on malaria incidence: an epidemiological study across Rwanda and Uganda

Submitted: 27 May 2015
Accepted: 11 November 2015
Published: 31 March 2016
Abstract Views: 5625
PDF: 1947
Appendix: 529
HTML: 3184
Appendix: 0
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Authors

We investigate the short-term effects of air temperature, rainfall, and socioeconomic indicators on malaria incidence across Rwanda and Uganda from 2002 to 2011. Delayed and nonlinear effects of temperature and rainfall data are estimated using generalised additive mixed models with a distributed lag nonlinear specification. A time series cross-validation algorithm is implemented to select the best subset of socioeconomic predictors and to define the degree of smoothing of the weather variables. Our findings show that trends in malaria incidence agree well with variations in both temperature and rainfall in both countries, although factors other than climate seem to play an important role too. The estimated short-term effects of air temperature and precipitation are nonlinear, in agreement with previous research and the ecology of the disease. These effects are robust to the effects of temporal correlation. The effects of socioeconomic data are difficult to ascertain and require further evaluation with longer time series. Climate-informed models had lower error estimates compared to models with no climatic information in 77 and 60% of the districts in Rwanda and Uganda, respectively. Our results highlight the importance of using climatic information in the analysis of malaria surveillance data, and show potential for the development of climateinformed malaria early warning systems.

Dimensions

Altmetric

PlumX Metrics

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Citations

Supporting Agencies

European Commission, Mexican National Council for Science and Technology, National Institute for Health Research, Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response at King’s College London

How to Cite

Colòn-González, F. J., Tompkins, A. M., Biondi, R., Bizimana, J. P., & Namanya, D. B. (2016). Assessing the effects of air temperature and rainfall on malaria incidence: an epidemiological study across Rwanda and Uganda. Geospatial Health, 11(s1). https://doi.org/10.4081/gh.2016.379

Similar Articles

1 2 > >> 

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.